The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuinness

There are shortcomings: Cilea, the most interesting character after the city itself, disappears halfway; and Leo’s pontifications, including a reading of “Shelley’s Ozyman-descu,” underscore the ironies too heavily.
-Publishers Weekly

Once the gleaming "Paris of the East," Bucharest in 1989 is a world of corruption and paranoia, in thrall to the repressive regime of Nicolae Ceau?escu. Old landmarks are falling to demolition crews, grocery shelves are empty, and informants are everywhere. Into this state of crisis, a young British man arrives to take a university post he never interviewed for. He is taken under the wing of Leo O'Heix, a colleague and master of the black market, and falls for the sleek Celia, daughter of a party apparatchik. Yet he soon learns that in this society, friendships are compromised, and loyalty is never absolute. And as the regime's authority falters, he finds himself uncomfortably, then dangerously, close to the eye of the storm. By turns thrilling and satirical, studded with poetry and understated revelation, The Last Hundred Days captures the commonplace terror of Cold War Eastern Europe. Patrick McGuinness's first novel is unforgettable.

Patrick McGuinness was born in Tunisia in 1968 and lived in Bucharest in the years leading up to the Romanian revolution. He is a professor of French and comparative literature at Oxford University and a fellow of St. Anne's College. As a poet, he has won an Eric Gregory Award and Poetry magazine's Levinson Prize. His latest collection, Jilted City, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. McGuinness lives between Oxford and North West Wales. His web site is www.patrickmcguinness.org.uk.

Publishers Weekly

Mar 19 2012

There are shortcomings: Cilea, the most interesting character after the city itself, disappears halfway; and Leo’s pontifications, including a reading of “Shelley’s Ozyman-descu,” underscore the ironies too heavily.

Toronto Star

Reviewed by Stephen Finucan
on
Jul 21 2012

The Last Hundred Days is engaging on every level. As a political thriller, it captures the murky world of cross and double-cross with the aplomb of a le Carré; as an historical fiction, it pulls back the iron curtain to reveal the truth.